Game Jam Kathmandu December 2007

From OLPC

The fist OLPC game jam was successfully held on Dec 15th 2007, at Prime College in Kathmandu. The purpose of the game jam was mainly to familiarize students, teachers and enthusiasts with squeak, its history, and how it is used to develop various applications--such as the activities developed by OLE Nepal. The event was intended to be a fun learning session rather than a programming lesson.
About 25 people attended the event but the most interesting and an important part that made this game jam a success was diversity. There were students of different grades, teachers with various background, the extremely talented OLE development team and expert like Bert Freudenberg who talked briefly about the history of squeak and Etoys, and showed some intriguing demos that set the tone for the day.
The event was divided into three parts:

1.Introduction (about OLPC and OLE-Nepal, squeak how-to, its interface and using squeak in general).

2.Scripting and Advance scripting in squeak.

3.Exercises and Interaction

There where practice sessions and breaks in between to give everyone a chance to work with squeak, explore its features, and ask questions and interact with the team.

The whole game jam was based on a simple car game that participants had to make during the course of the day, and the simplicity with with they could use features in squeak to do something like this kept everyone glued to their screen. Many even took initiative to do more; some participants were trying to control the car that they just got running with keystrokes rather than using the mouse, and another participant was trying to reduce the speed of the car once its strays away from the track that it should be running on, adding a more authentic feel to this simple game that he just made. At the end of the day everyone seem to be wanting to learn more.

OLE Nepal is planning to host a game jam every month for the next few months.